


god builds a church, the devil builds a chapel

by houselannister



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 10:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houselannister/pseuds/houselannister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stannis Baratheon and Cersei Lannister await their execution.</p><p>---</p><p>(He’s dreamed of this, of the people of King’s Landing welcoming him with open arms into the city that was his by right. But now they call his name because they want his head, and it’s almost funny. He starts to see why Cersei laughs. Death has a certain uncanny ability to shove in your face the sarcastic truth of your existence.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	god builds a church, the devil builds a chapel

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Bronson, you cunt!

The wolves come again, just like someone foretold in a past Cersei Lannister does not remember. She thought them dead – hoped them dead – but when the battle is lost and the city gates open to the white standards, she sees them there, riding up the pebbled street. Behind them are the pale Tyrells, and the dark Martells: she laughs when they reach the Red Keep, slouched against the blades that cut her skin – the throne rejected her, but she did not stand up.

They look at her, as she laughs, and they don’t know she is laughing at the notion that eventually she succeeded where her useless king-husband failed: the kingdom marches as one, seven is nothing but a number in the darkness. They march as one and they march against her.

Through the foggy hate, Cersei Lannister is a Queen at last.

Her kingdom is whole.

 

000

 

He wakes up to the persistent ticking of water against stone, days after the last time he was awake and conscious, weeks after the dreadful battle of castle Black, where he first felt the bite of metal shackles around his wrists. Stannis Baratheon does not remember the last time he saw sunlight in the morning, nor stars in the evening. From tent to tent, from camp to camp, they crossed, and he with them: his path leads to death, but does so torturing slowly.

He’s been here before, donning his armor, as tall as his brother would let him stand, with a stag on his breastplate and without a scratch on his face.

The cells of the Red Keep are dark, but not as dark as he remembers: the torches shed some light, and the cold stone turns a shade of orange to the flickering flames. Stannis pushes himself up, groaning as his sore muscles stretch and beg for stillness instead. His eyes are encrusted with blood – his blood, he remembers, and Davos’, as he held his dying form because he did not have to die but he did all the same – but when he looks across his own cell, across the bars and into another one, a hair away, he sees her. He knows her eyes are green, even if he can’t see them from here. Just like the cell, he remembers her differently than what she looks like now. Her hair was longer, her cheeks less hollowed, and she worn the finest, brightest silks, not the deadly rags that cover her body now.

He supposes it makes sense. War made prisoners of them both and took away their should; they have nothing but the skin that holds them together.

Stannis wonders who will die first.

 

000

 

In her sleepless nights she reflects on how hilarious it is to go from captor to captive; she thinks of the people she sent down here, for Qyburn, for torture, and she asks herself if any of those wretched souls inhabited the same cell, if any of them still haunted it nowadays. Perhaps that was the reason why she couldn’t sleep. Perhaps theirs were the voices she kept hearing, whispers in her ears, crying, wailing, bouncing against the walls and never, ever, silent.

Silence is something she no longer knows, and that’s why she speaks one night, addresses him.

“Your brother condemned us both,” she says. Her voice is small, frivolous like it was in those sunny afternoons spent in the garden, talking to a flock of maidens and knights, adored and worshipped. It’s another life that Cersei has no strength to cling to.

Stannis is a shape against the wall, in the corner: she saw him the day they threw her in her own cage, battered and bruised, his face bloody. Broken in more than just his body  
They defeated him first, and that sent a jolt up Cersei’s spine. Eventually, she lasted longer, she endured more. She outlived Robert, and she outlived Renly; she must have outlived Shireen and that shameful bastard, since no one had heard of them since the fire of castle Black. The red priestess died too, at her own hand. With a deep sigh she crawls to the bars, and stares at the black shadow that is Stannis Baratheon, and she laughs. It’s scary how loud her laughter is: she’s gone mad.

But if Stannis dies first, the Lannisters will have outlived the Baratheons, and that’s something worth laughing at.

 

000

 

Cersei’s words hang in the air for a whole day after that. She laughs in the night, and shifts in his dark corner, looking at her and it’s a sight: she’s lost her mind, her eyes are wide and her hands draw invisible patterns on the stone. She mutters to herself, laughs hysterically sometimes. Another man might be afraid of that creature, but he is Stannis Baratheon, and what little pride fate has left in him keeps him from feeling anything other than confusion. To him, there’s nothing to laugh at, not even Cersei Lannister’s weakening mental health. He should feel avenged, or satisfied at least.

There’s no point: in death they’re all the same, and death is what awaits the both of them.

He answers the night after, his voice coarse and tired. “You killed him.”

Cersei’s head snaps up and looks at him, her eyes shine through the darkness; perhaps she’d thought him dead when he didn’t answer on the spot. He wasn’t: he just didn’t think her worthy of an answer whatsoever. She crawls to the bars not unlike she’d done the night before, and he sees parts of her faces, dirty and pale. Cersei Lannister died a long time ago: she died with her son Joffrey, her daughter Myrcella, and she dies a little more when the little king Tommen was murdered in his bed by his little wife. What looks at him is flesh and bones, but little else.

“He disregarded me,” was the short answer, spoken like a child, with eyes full of wonder and amusement.

“He disregarded me as well, but I didn’t murder him.”

The cells are silent after that, but Cersei doesn’t shrink away from the bars. She keeps looking at him and he wonders what she’s thinking.

 

000

 

Death doesn’t scare her. She’s been ready since the day they told her Jaime was dead, murdered by outlaws in the name of vows unkept and broken promises. He was always weaker than her, but he was hers nonetheless. We came into this world together, we will leave together. It doesn’t make much sense for her to live, not with her children in the cold earth, and their father with them. She’s all House Lannister has left, and soon she will be ashes as well. She will follow her father, and her mother, and her brother.

(Tyrion was never a Lannister. Tyrion died beside the dragon whore.)

The footsteps are sudden and quick, and violent against the stone, and she hears voices overlapping with the sound of metal clinging to the soldiers’ skin. There’s four of them, clad in white and grey, proud and tall in the service of those wolves that should have been dead but were not. They look at her through the bars, then Stannis. They stand there for what feels like ages, and she is reminded of those times when she’d have to choose between silks for her clothing. Like meat on display.

Cersei prays he will die first.

 

000

 

Stannis knows it will be him. Lone and crazy, Cersei Lannister is still the Queen, the villain of the story: it makes sense they will kill her last, like lemon cake after lamprey pie. She will be the last, and it will be grand and exemplar, the remarkable mark in history of the beginning of the Stark reign. The age of the wolf will begin with the killing of a lion. It’s bitter that they don’t think him that important, a defeat of sorts, but he’d rather die now, than endure this a day longer. When the guards arrive, he stands up with difficulty before they even move to his bars.

“About time,” he said, with a grimace. He can barely stand up, and he steadies himself by leaning against the damp wall. He will not go like a coward: he will go like his father raised him, with his head held high because he did what he was supposed to do. They punish him now for doing something that was right, they murder him for wanting what was his. There’s a quality, and an irony, to his ending that speaks of the rest of his life.

They have to drag him and push him, manhandle him, not because he makes a stand but because his legs simply won’t cooperate. He leaves the darkness of his cell behind him, and Cersei’s laughter echoes through the walls. What a terrible joke, that hers would be the last laughter he heard in life: if only Shireen lived, he would very much prefer to hear her laughing, see her smiling, hear her call him father one last time. The Gods know he didn’t stop and listen to her nearly as much as he should have.

He regrets that now, as the sunlight touches his face for the first time in a month. The crowd cheers, the crowd yells, the crowd calls for his name. 

(He’s dreamed of this, of the people of King’s Landing welcoming him with open arms into the city that was his by right. But now they call his name because they want his head, and it’s almost funny. He starts to see why Cersei laughs. Death has a certain uncanny ability to shove in your face the sarcastic truth of your existence.)

Sansa Stark looks pale, and there is no doubt in his mind that if it depended on her, he would not die that day. Maybe he would not die at all. But he’d rather die than suffer another kingdom that has no right to the crown it holds. He is tired of injustice, and he’s finally come to accept that there is none in this world. This is no place for men like Stannis.

When the sword is drawn and the executioner approaches, Stannis thinks of Renly.

 

000

 

Cersei Lannister hears the crowd cheering and she knows it's done. Stannis Baratheon dies and Cersei Lannister still breathes, and the Lannisters have won one last time before they're erased from the face of this Earth. She laughs again, she never stops laughing, and her head is flooded with voices that belong to her past. Ther eis one voice that she hears, and it's louder than all the rest. It calls her name, and it's so loud that she turns around, because it's there, in that cell, with him.

He is there, blond and glorious, and he flashes her that pearly white grin that made her heart flutter when she was sixteen years old and innocent still. He is golden like she wants to remember him, and it kills the laughter. Her eyes brim with tears as she sees him; she wishes she could touch him, but she can't because he is not there, not really. He looks down at her, crouches beside her, brushes a strand of hair behind her ears. That's when Cersei Lannister knows everything is doomed, everything is lost. Everything was written before they had a chance to change it.

"Valonqar."

His hands wrap around her throat.

(But Jaime is dead, and it's her own hands instead.)

Then it's over.


End file.
